Feeding the Dead: Ancestor Worship in Ancient India. By Matthew R. Sayers. Oxford University Press, August 5, 2013. 208 pages. ISBN-10: 0199896437 ISBN-13: 978-0199896431
摘要
This concise book provides a much‐needed update to the study of ancestor worship in South Asia from the Vedic period through the time of the early Dharmaśāstras. Sayers gives a comprehensive overview of the “discursive construction” of the rites while making important contributions, such as convincingly arguing for the posteriority of the piṇḍapitṛyajña over the pitṛyajña and carefully explicating the emergence of the śrāddha rite as a central aspect of domestic religiosity. His approach is to be praised for its sensitivity to the breadth and complexity of the ritual tradition, both textual and extra‐textual, and in his integration of both Brāhmaṇical and Buddhist materials. What makes this work more broadly relevant, however, is how it uses ancestor worship to illuminate issues of general importance for religion on the subcontinent in the ancient period: 1) the “soteriological debate” between renouncers, espousing beliefs in transmigration, and ritualists, favoring achievement of an eternal heaven; 2) the shift in emphasis from solemn to domestic ritual and the emergence of the domestic religious “market”; and 3) the development of new “religious experts,” both Buddhist and Brahmin, supported by theologies that allowed them to “mediate” directly between the householder and the gods or ancestors. Although the reader will find little analysis of the social conditions driving these developments and may wish for their fuller contextualization in the contemporary religious environment, Sayers's book succeeds as a careful analysis of the development of ancestor worship that encourages an understanding of householder religion in ancient India beyond the categories of Brahmin and Buddhist.
